Sermon — Sunday, March 5, 2023
The Rev. Greg Johnston
“And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,
so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him
may have eternal life.” (John 3:14-15)
There are many hard jobs in the world, but without any doubt “rescue diver” is in a category of its own. You may remember the story from about five years ago of a group of young Thai men—a soccer team and their coach, in fact—who were found alive and rescued nine days after intense rains had cut them off fresh air. They were found by a team of volunteer divers, a mix of international expats and Thai Navy special forces, one of whom lost his life in the process. To reach the stranded team, the rescuers had to traverse nearly a mile of the cave, much of it underwater, too narrow in some places to wear a scuba tank. And then they had to do the same thing, in reverse, while pulling another person behind them.
It must have taken an incredible amount of courage to be the rescuers: to jump into that water, knowing that you were already safe and dry on this side. But it took courage to be rescued, as well: to go from being trapped in a place that was dark and scary but at least warm and dry into the danger and darkness of the water, and to try to make it through to freedom and safety on the other side. One is the courage of self-sacrifice, of risking danger to yourself solely for the benefit of another person. And one is the courage of taking a leap of faith, of seeing some British guy in a wetsuit emerge out of a hole in the ground, grabbing the rope he gives you, and hanging on for dear life.
If you were here last Sunday at Coffee Hour, you may remember that we gave some of our younger members “Saint John’s Bingo” cards, to ask questions from some of our adults. One of the questions one of the kids asked me was, “What’s your favorite Bible verse???” And as my life flashed before me, and I desperately willed myself to remember even a single verse of the Bible, the words “John 3:16” flashed into my mind. And how could they not? If you’ve watched a football game, seen a bumper sticker, been handed a tract in the street, you’ve probably seen this verse cited, even without its text as an almost self-contained description of the gospel. “John 3:16,” somebody’s poster says in the stands, urging you to go and look it up. And if you do, you find the words: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” (John 3:16) I’ve even seen it flown across the sky on a banner by one of those planes.
I didn’t say “John 3:16,” by the way. I said “1 John 4:7,” a little different. Feel free to look it up. But you can understand why John 3:16has become the go-to citation when some people want to point you to a single verse to read. Standing on its own, it sums up one very common understanding of the gospel, one typical idea of what’s “good news” about Christianity. You might hear variations on this idea referred to by slightly different names; one version is called the “ransom theory,” another is “penal substitutionary atonement.” It’s the almost-transactional idea that human sin had left us in debt, and God paid the price; or that we were liable to some punishment for our misdeeds, and Jesus took the punishment in our place. God would have been entitled to destroy the world, to foreclose on our account or to punish us as we deserved; but “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son; so that everyone who believes in him may not perish, but may have eternal life.” You can almost hear the economic language in the words. It’s as if God gave Jesus as the payment to purchase something—from the Devil? from himself?—so that we would have eternal life. And this is actually the root of the word “redemption.” As any of our Latin scholars in the congregation could tell you, redemption means “buying back.”
And that is one way to understand this verse, John 3:16. But it does very little to help us understand what on earth Jesus is talking about in the other sixteen verses we just heard. And so I want to suggest a slightly different understanding of where Jesus is coming from here. Not the “ransom theory” or the “penal substitutionary theory” but the “rescue diver theory of the atonement.”
Jesus tries three times to convey to Nicodemus the sense that Jesus’ own life is a kind of process, a journey from a place far off to a place that is near and back. “You must be born from above,” Jesus says, and Nicodemus misunderstands. He misinterprets Jesus’ “from above” as meaning “again,” which is the same word in Greek. And he asks, “Can anyone enter a second time into the womb?” But Jesus is talking about a different kind of birth, from a different watery place: the new birth, perhaps, of baptism, by water and the Spirit. (John 3:3-5) And his emphasis is on the “for above,” the sense that this new birth must be from heaven.
And so Jesus says again, using a different image, “The wind blows where it chooses… but you don’t know where it comes from or where it goes.” (3:8) The wind, the Spirit—again, the same word in Greek—travels an enormous journey, across the face of the earth, and blows where it will. And Nicodemus is baffled. “How can these things be?” (3:9)
So Jesus says to him, again talking about a journey through space but in slightly-more-concrete terms, “No one’s ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man.” (That’s Jesus.) “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness”—perhaps a story for another time—“so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world…” and so on. (3:13-16)
Each of these is a different way of describing what is happening in Jesus’ own life on this earth. It’s Jesus who was born above, Jesus who came down from heaven. It’s Jesus who’s like the wind, and you, Nicodemus, don’t understand where he came from or where he’s going. He descended from heaven, and he will ascend into heaven again, and as he says in another verse, “when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself.” (John 12:32)
Again and again, Jesus emphasizes the motion: from above to below, from here to there, descending and ascending and being lifted up. For John, and for us when we hear the words of the Gospel of John, the phrase “lifted up” always means three things. It means when Jesus is “lifted up” on the Cross on Good Friday, and dies. It means when he is “lifted up” from the grave on Easter Sunday, and rises again. And it means when he is “lifted up” from the earth on Ascension Day, when he returns from earth to heaven. I came down to earth from heaven, Jesus tells Nicodemus, and I am going back up there soon. “And when I am lifted up, I will draw all people to myself”; I will bring you up there with me.
And that’s the most remarkable thing. Because when you read it in this context, Jesus’ life and death look less like a transaction, and more like a rescue mission. Jesus comes down from heaven, not (at least not, not only) to pay the price for our redemption or bear the punishment for our wrongdoing, but to save us, actually save us from the dark, damp cave in which we’re trapped. He dives down into the dark waters of this world, and swims toward us, and brings a rope to try to drag us with him back to heaven.
And he gives us a choice. Not the choice of whether to “believe” or not, in an intellectual sense. But the choice to trust. To trust, as Abraham had to trust, to leave behind “[his] country and [his] father’s house,” to leave a place where he was comfortable and follow God toward the promise of something better. (Gen. 12:1) To trust, as those Thai soccer players had to trust, to hold onto the rope and follow, to make the leap of faith out of the dark cave and into the darker waters, so that we might emerge into the fresh air on the other side.
Jesus is somewhere on a journey from heaven to earth and back again, on a mission to save you, to heal you, to rescue you from whatever is afflicting you, to bring you out of whatever darkness surrounds you and return you to the light. Where are you? Are you hiding somewhere in the cave, convinced things aren’t so bad in there? Are you somewhere in the water, cold and wet and afraid you’ll never get out? Are you clinging to the rope, trusting God to bring you through it all? Or are you somewhere on the other side, finally breathing fresh air?